


every body is a ledger

by anthropologicalhands



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Rebecca doesn't really appear in this fic, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, but it's all about her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 08:14:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14374626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropologicalhands/pseuds/anthropologicalhands
Summary: When an almost-stranger comes to town, all original balances must be recalculated.





	every body is a ledger

**Author's Note:**

> notes: au where the names of people who will have a profound impact upon you appear across your body. The kind of world where Rebecca Bunch would like to believe in soulmates, but the situation is more nuanced than that.

Josh Chan’s body is so dense with names that he could check himself against the West Covina registry. He talks to anyone at any given moment, always open to their story, always ready to lend a hand or a kind word. To him, everyone makes an impression –so much so that he sometimes has trouble distinguishing the significance of what one name could mean over the others. Very few of his names have faded, because he has been around most of the same people all his life.

Rebecca is one of the few exceptions, and even her name blooms bright and clear again, just under his left ribs, not two days after they cross paths in New York. After she comes to West Covina, he believes he knows why she’s special, being both new and familiar at once –a gentle memory grown up smart and strong and beautiful, who looks at him like he’s become someone amazing.

Later, after their botched wedding, her desperate actions and horrifying spiral, her name is a wound, sunk so deep into him that it hurts to breathe.

It’s healing, now, but the process is slow.

( _He realizes doesn’t know who he is, under all of these names, or how to handle the fact that not all impacts are positive_.)

~

The same evening that Paula Proctor pledges to help Rebecca in her quest for love, she discovers the younger woman’s name curved under her navel.

It’s appropriate – here’s the daughter she never had, someone she can nurture and guide down the golden path to a true happily ever after. Paula’s made her bed, but with Rebecca, things can be different. Rebecca still has potential.

She didn’t expect that Rebecca would do the same for her.

( _Scott’s name, banding her right elbow, was never as large as Jeff’s, but as the year progresses and their marriage improves, it warms to a vivid red, the same shade as her hair, while Jeff’s fades to the off-white of an old scar._ )

 ~

Greg Serrano has  _Rebecca_  scratched across his palm, stretching over his lifeline in an exaggerated arc. Even holding up a hand in greeting leaves him self-conscious, like he’s putting his feelings on full display. It becomes a habit to keep his hands full or his fingers curled up into a fist, to maintain some kind of protection.

Even after they get together, he cannot work up the courage to tell her how she has marked him, why his hands are so warm every time she touches him.

Instead, he keeps a glass in his hand and keeps them coming, desperate to avoid the moment where she will turn away from him, should he reach out to her.

One DUI and a month in recovery later, his hands are open, but the realization is bittersweet, for he also knows that he cannot hold her again.

( _For years, he was convinced that the names of his childhood friends would be the only ones he would ever bear, right up to the moment he’s at the airport and chooses to step away, and head towards the future._ )

~

Valencia Perez has never gotten along with other girls, but Rebecca is funny and weird and smart, and it takes her less than a day to duck under Valencia’s defenses, a bottle of wine and two glasses in hand. So when Valencia sees the beginning glimmers of “R-E-B” running up her calf, she has a moment of actual hope, that this is a girl she can finally,  _finally_  be close with, to call a friend—

Then Rebecca kisses her out of nowhere, and it turns out she’s not just Josh’s friend but his ex-girlfriend, and Valencia’s heart breaks even as her anger erupts.

When she goes home that night, still simmering, the name has already faded. Somehow, despite herself, she is still disappointed.

It returns, later. After she has killed off a ten-year relationship and Rebecca shows up at her apartment with some tissue-thin excuse about driving to Dunkin’ Donuts together, Valencia thinks about that moment when they could be friends and, against better judgment, agrees.

( _She learns to be part of a girl group and she meets a girl with laugh lines who calls her funny, and one day she wakes up and most of the names across her body are those of the women she has let into her life._ )

~

It’s the morning before her abnormal psychology class that Heather Davis notices her weird neighbor’s name hovering just above her robot tattoo.

Heather has never cared for signs, but neither has she ever had many friends, so Rebecca’s name on her shoulder is intriguing, not scary. She brushes a thumb over the name, the inherent warmth, and considers.

She decides that Rebecca won’t be a case study: she’ll be a friend.

( _Heather’s a student, but there are things to learn outside of classes_.)

~

Before West Covina, Nathaniel Plimpton III always prided himself on the lack of names to blemish his body, for the alternative would have been to acknowledge that there might be something wrong.

Rebecca’s name doesn’t appear after their kiss, though he is unsettled enough by his initial reaction to keep checking over the next few days.

But when he tries to feel normal again, and turn his focus back on his work, he gets sick and his father cuts in across everything and leaves him shattered. The next time he sees Rebecca, she looks the same, brittle and all-too-ready to fall to pieces, and something like empathy snaps across his synapses and spurs him to action.

The day after Rebecca hugs him for bringing Silas Bunch to her, Nathaniel finds her name across his sternum, between the edges of his shirt as he dresses for work.

He fumbles with the remaining buttons and tells himself that he’s reading too much into it; he can figure it out later.

( _The problem is that ‘later’ never seems to come. It gets pushed two weeks past the wedding-that-wasn’t, the plan that must be undone, and the singular, horrifying moment when he learns that ‘later’ was nearly ‘never’. Even when it does not, even as their relationship crests and breaks and recobbles in record time, her name remains stubbornly bold and clear._ )


End file.
